One Nation One Ration Card, PDS Interoperability — Technology demands
With the Coming of ‘One Nation One Ration Card’, It’s Important to Get the Technology Right. A nation-wide portability scheme is the need of the hour. But one cannot forget that technological safeguards are needed to preserve a citizen’s right to food as well as her right to privacy.
When the National Food Security Act (NFSA) was enacted in 2013, food grains were made a legal entitlement, but ration card holders were by and large locked into a particular geographical area.
Enter the ‘One Nation One Ration Card (ONORC)’ programme, a Public Distribution System (PDS) portability scheme that will enable people to to get food grains as per eligibility according to NFSA), 2013 irrespective of their location in the country.
As of August 2020, 24 States and Union Territories have boarded the scheme.
The nationwide portability of PDS or food rations is being implemented through what the government calls the Integrated Management of Public Distribution System (IM-PDS) — a centralised system that integrates all participating state PDS into a single Public Distribution System Network (PDSN) with portability / withdrawal of ration from anywhere in the country as a promise.
As the migrant crisis during lock down phases of COVID highlighted, it is important to access critical state support such as food, irrespective of the location.
While the IM-PDS scheme was originally slated to get completed by March 2020, later revised to March 2021 and is now likely to get extended further. The Cental government is so keen to bring all states on the network that one of the pre-conditions it has imposed for it has imposed a condition on joining the scheme for additional credit to combat COVID beyond FRBM limits.
One major component of the new system is the technology layer which will be acting as the backbone in enabling beneficiaries to withdraw their entitlements, optimizing the supply chain of food grains.
In India, large-scale technology-centric governance projects like Aadhaar and GST have caused glitches, often hurting the vulnerable, it is important for us to get the technology right to support people needing food in these troubling times.
As ONORC becomes a reality, it is important to take a look at the recent history of technology in PDS and ensure that its evolution preserves the rights of citizens while not affecting their access to food.
History
In 2001, a case in Supreme Court demanding “Right to Food ‘’ was filed by People’s Union for Civil Liberties. The court passed many interim orders and even appointed a committee under Justice Wadhwa, which was tasked to study PDS in detail.
There had been multiple efforts by different states on various aspects of digitization of PDS, a notable one being a 2008 BCG pilot in Odisha for the United Nation’s World Food Programme that used fingerprints and iris biometrics at point of sale. The Justice Wadhwa committee besides studying operational / implementation issues in multiple states, also submitted a “Report on Computerisation of PDS Operations” in February 2009.
This report talked about computerising the record keeping in supply chain of food grains from procurement, warehouse storage, movement, distribution end point (Fair Price Shop — FPS) as well as explored on beneficiary identification using biometrics, Point of Sale machines(ePoS) with authentication capabilities supporting SCOSTA standard smart card.
In June 2010, the UIDAI, then under the Planning Commission released a working paper on “Envisioning a role for Aadhaar in the Public Distribution System” which first explored the role of Aadhaar authentication in PDS across the supply chain including the final delivery at FPS.
- Interim report of the Task Force on Direct Transfer of Subsidies on Kerosene, LPG and Fertilizer — June 2011
- Report of the Task Force on an IT Strategy for PDS and an implementable solution for the direct transfer of subsidy for Food and Kerosene — October 2011.
The Nandan Nilekani led task force report in October 2011, reviewed the state of computerization in states and went ahead to propose a privately owned, strategically government controlled National Information Utility “Public Distribution System Network” (PDSN) which will be a single entity in charge of end to end IT back end of PDS, along the lines of GST Network (GSTN).
The Department of Food and PDS in Feb 2012, however dismissed the report and proposed to set up a computerization platform developed by NIC called PDS Common Services Platform following the court orders in the Right to Food case.
In October 2012, Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs gave its approval for Component-l of the Plan Scheme on End-to-End Computerisation of Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS) Operations in the 12th Five Year Plan with an outlay of Rs. 884.07 crore on a cost sharing basis. The project consists of
- Digitization of Ration cards/ beneficiary and other databases — Ration Card Management System (RCMS)
- Computerization of supply-chain management, including Fair Price Shop(FPS) with electronic Point of Sale(ePoS) machine.
- Setting up of transparency portal
- Grievance redress mechanisms.
While multiple states started implementing the plan scheme, 2 solutions were being developed in parallel.
- Common Application Software (CAS) for PDS by NIC
- “Aadhaar ecosystem / unknown entities” developed Aadhaar Enabled Public Distribution System, now operated by National Informatics Centre (NIC) for parts of PDS technology stack like Fair Price Shop (FPS) Automation using electronic Point of Sale (ePoS), beneficiary authentication using Aadhaar Based Biometric Authentication (ABBA).
After the enactment of NFSA 2013, it became the responsibility of the state to put in place these systems and funding for the same was decided in the 12th five year plan.
While the NIC solution CAS, used Textual & Demographic De-duplication (also used for gas cylinder subsidy database pruning) for pruning the beneficiary database, AePDS used Aadhaar as deduplication tool as part of the Ration Card Management System (RCMS) module.
While the Aadhaar case were initially roadblocks for AePDS to roll out and hence some states chose to use CAS, eventually AePDS was rolled out in many states, at least on beneficiary database deduplication as well as FPS point of sale (ePoS) authentication. Some states like Tamil Nadu, still use an in house system which uses Aadhaar only for beneficiary de-duplication and does not enforce biometric authentication.
One Nation One Ration Card (ONORC) — Integrated Management of PDS (IM-PDS)
In April 2018, the central government announced a new central sector scheme PDS portability called Integrated Management of PDS (IM-PDS), which will allow an NFSA beneficiary to withdraw food from any ration shop in the country. IM-PDS uses Public Distribution System Network (PDSN) backend — a data centralization platform to bring One Nation One Ration Card — ONORC. The scheme was allotted ₹ 127.3 Crores till Mar 2020 for states to put IT infrastructure to support portability. In May 2020, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the national rollout of a ‘One Nation, One Ration Card’ system in all states and Union Territories by March 2021, with the hope that all states will join ONORC for relaxation in state debt limits to tackle COVID crisis, though there is some reluctance from states like West Bengal, TamilNadu, Chattisgarh, Assam, Odisha which have better PDS systems of its own
IM-PDS is essentially PDSN from technology implementation perspective, with sole difference being NIC being the technology implementer for the Department of Food and Public Distribution(DFPD) which will house the platform, as against a non-profit entity that was envisaged by the 2011 Nandan Nilekani Task Force that was dumped by the then UPA-2 government.
While the scheme might appear useful for migrant workers, especially in the aftermath of COVID migrant crisis, one needs to be mindful of harms the system can bring about, for which we look into implementation details of the scheme.
Technology Implementation of ONORC
A letter written in May 2018 to NIC in charge by DFPD details preparatory work for IM-PDS implementation at centre, state level including creation of central repository with regular synchronization, changes expected to RCMS for new ration card issuance / beneficiary addition, deduplication and the broad flow of a portable PDS transaction which consists of 20 steps in system for a withdrawal of ration. This high level document is the only publicly available detailed document of IM-PDS which powers ONORC.
When a ration card holder seeks grain from any ration shop outside the state, a portability request is sent to the central server to check the eligibility in the home state and send the details to the destination state after logging in the central system.
Then the card holder needs to biometrically authenticate using Aadhaar to complete the transaction. The destination states which issue grains will be compensated from migrants’ source states. The ration shops which have a larger migrant population will need to stock more and all ration shops must have an excess buffer to cater migratory demand and the supply chain of grains will be altered as per consumption data. Any errors in the demand estimation will lead to exclusion due to unavailability.
Surveillance + Profiling
Another letter written in August 2018 to states by DFPD seeks consent of states to use NIC’s Aadhaar authentication services for all transactions in PDS (as against states’ existing Aadhaar authentication infrastructure ) citing technical limitation that central system can identify beneficiaries uniquely to support portability only if all states share the same Aadhaar authentication service infrastructure operated by NIC. This is a direct result of lack of privacy by design in Aadhaar tokenization. This routing of all PDS transactions through single AUA not only creates a central database of PDS authentications of individuals, but also gives room to single point of failure in case of downtimes / cyber attacks.
Aadhaar Judgement while discussing traceability / surveillance capabilities of UIDAI analyzes the kind of data available with UIDAI. However, as per the current design proposed that places reliance on single Aadhaar authentication service (AUA by NIC), the operator of PDSN — NIC will have access to device, IP, location, purpose of authentication whenever ration card holder withdraws PDS. A time series view of this data centralizes and stores migratory, consumption pattern data of a migrant available to NIC, by extension central government.
IM-PDS with a PDSN back-end will centralize consumption data, specifically migrant consumption and the broader aim is to tune the supply chain for efficiency which will include location of FPS, stocking / movement of grains, procurement of grains. Such centralized data could then drive decisions towards food security policy across the supply chain from procurement to distribution. There have been recommendations in the past to move towards DBT for food (some Union Territories already give its citizens the option of getting vouchers) and a reduced role of state in food distribution which could lead to increased exclusion errors inherited through the DBT regime.
Technology demands for rights preserving ONORC
- Any and all de-duplication algorithms, software developed to prune the beneficiary database must be available publicly, along with detailed documentation and logs of such software which exclude duplicates. This ensures explain-ability of algorithms and allows people to audit their correctness, preventing rampant exclusion errors at database clean up stage. Since the technology is being implemented by NIC, a government agency for the purpose of welfare, the same has to be open sourced to enable technology oversight, make the rules of the deduplication exercise open, not doing so would be akin to punishing people under an unpublished law.
- Any and all data-analytics systems, research work on operations that optimises supply chain operations must be available publicly and verified independently for their accuracy before relying on them for data-driven decision making on supply chain operations (particularly, but not limited to closure of FPS, procurement centres for the sake of efficiency). It is to be noted that UN’s World Food Programme and IIT-Delhi have entered into a strategic partnership on building such systems.
- The consumption data of individual be deleted monthly / once in 2 months, so as to not create a perpetual history of consumption which gives centre vast amount of metadata on consumption, migratory patterns of individual / communities — all of which invade into the privacy of individual and is absolutely not necessary to be stored in an identity linked manner for future provision of services.
- Doing away with mandatory biometrics (ABBA) in PDS as it not only causes exclusion, but also risks the entire population which also has bank accounts linked to Aadhaar and biometric attacks that empty bank accounts. Should Aadhaar authentication be mandatorily needed at each withdrawal, provide the option of OTP based authentication. Also, there needs to be a cost-benefit analysis of perpetual use of authentication infrastructure and gains it gives through the pilferage it claims to prevent. In a state like Tamil Nadu, already having universal PDS, it is a needless tax on the state’s limited resources to deploy 33,222 biometric ePoS and enforce biometric authentication for each withdrawal every month. Paisa wise and Aadhaar foolish.
- Even where biometrics is used, the current proposal of using a single AUA defeats the assurances given in the Aadhaar case in Supreme Court as if all authentications for PDS are routed through a single AUA (NIC), which also operates the interoperable PDS platform IM-PDS as well as provides services for states to run their PDS through CAS, AePDS — It directly amounts to surveillance as transactions across time can be merged together. Further digitized beneficiary data centrally accessed along with consumption data can be used to demographically profile individuals, build a proposed social registry, data on which could be a proxy for NPR / NRC data collection that needs a much larger political debate
- The monetary compensation as well as movement of grains to states that cater to migrants needs to happen in a consistent time bound manner and delays such as the one in GST on compensatory cess could mean that the promise of portability as well as trust in centrally networked PDS system is broken.
Thanks to Anuj Srivas for edits.
